Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending To Surpass $675 Billion In 2024

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% to total $675.4 billion in 2024, up from $561 billion in 2023, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. This growth is being driven by generative AI (GenAI) and application modernisation.

“The continued growth we expect to see in public cloud spending can be largely attributed to GenAI due to the continued creation of general-purpose foundation models and the ramp up to delivering GenAI-enabled applications at scale,” said Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “Because of this continued growth, we expect public cloud end-user spending to eclipse the one trillion-dollar mark before the end of this decade.”

All segments of the cloud market are expected to see growth in 2024. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth at 25.6%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 20.6% (see Table 1).

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

2023 Spending 2023

Growth (%)

2024 Spending 2024

Growth (%)

2025 Spending 2025

Growth (%)

Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS)  

 

142,934

 

 

19.5

 

 

172,449

 

 

20.6

 

 

211,589

 

 

22.7

Cloud Application Services (SaaS)  

205,998

 

18.1

 

247,203

 

20.0

 

295,083

 

19.4

Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS)  

 

66,162

 

 

7.5

 

 

72,675

 

 

9.8

 

 

82,262

 

 

13.2

Cloud Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)  

 

2,708

 

 

11.4

 

 

3,062

 

 

13.1

 

 

3,437

 

 

12.3

Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS)  

 

143,302

 

 

19.1

 

 

180,044

 

 

25.6

 

 

232,391

 

 

29.1

Total Market 561,104 17.3 675,433 20.4 824,763 22.1

Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Source: Gartner (May 2024)

“IaaS continues at a robust growth rate that is reflective of the GenAI revolution that is underway,” said Nag. “The need for infrastructure to undertake AI model training, inferencing and fine tuning has only been growing and will continue to grow exponentially and have a direct effect on IaaS consumption.”

While cloud infrastructure and platform services are driving the highest spending growth, SaaS remains the largest segment of the cloud market in end-user spending. SaaS spending is projected to grow 20% to total $247.2 billion in 2024.

“SaaS spend is driven by applications being modernized by independent software vendors to run in a SaaS-based consumption model,” said Nag. “Organizations continue to increase their usage of cloud for specific use cases such as AI, machine learning, Internet of Things and big data which is driving this SaaS growth.”

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 19.8%, to total $7.3 billion in 2024 (see Table 2).

Table 2. MENA Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

2023 Spending 2023

Growth (%)

2024 Spending 2024

Growth (%)

2025 Spending 2025

Growth (%)

Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS) 1,504  

 

16.9

1,805  

 

20

 

 

2,275

 

 

26

Cloud Application Services (SaaS) 2,103  

13.1

2,505  

19.1

 

3,004

 

20

Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS) 1,093  

 

4.8

1,195  

 

9.3

 

 

1,404

 

 

17.5

Cloud Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) 141  

-1.2

153  

8.9

 

170

 

10.8

Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) 1,259  

 

27.2

1,652  

 

31.2

 

 

2,243

 

 

35.8

Total Market 6,100 14.6 7,309 19.8 9,096 24.4

Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Source: Gartner (May 2024)

“Public cloud spending is expected to surge as companies in the MENA region are moving towards becoming fully digitalized corporations. Additionally, Middle Eastern countries are also looking for a common economic goal of becoming technology and data centric. Organizations are using cloud as an enabler of technologies such as AI and business analytics to enhance the capabilities,” said Shailendra Upadhyay, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner.

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